


Children of Ash and Ruin

by Keenir



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Beowulf references, Gen, The Hobbit References, bog bodies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 05:01:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keenir/pseuds/Keenir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ragnarok is over, and Sif awakens in a world quite different from what she had.  But is it all gone?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Children of Ash and Ruin

**Author's Note:**

> _'They are fatherless creatures, and their whole ancestry is hidden in a past of demons and ghosts.'_  
>  \--Beowulf, line 1355.

**All my life, there has always been one rule above all others: destroy your dead. Destroy _all_ dead.**

**Then Ragnarok happened, and I didn’t wake up for a long time.**

* * *

Sif felt herself being pulled above the thick water, above the runny ground by a broad hand strong as Thor's own. The grip was not Thor's, was another's.

Her muscles were tired, were sore. Sif's lungs pulled in rich air, invigorating breath to steady her, to ready her.

"Peace, little girl, calm, young'in," Sif was told by the possessor of that broad hand. "Strength will come in time. You need finish waking first, you much end your long sleep more fully.

"I am Sif. Who are you?" and Sif's eyes made out a woman who was taken aback by her or her question, one who looked too slender and thin to have been so strong - yet there was no other person around. Sif’s mind sparked and began fishing for memories.

"I am Wealhtheow," she answered Sif. "Few can speak so soon upon being birthed from the peat, upon being pulled up."

"Ever have I been distinctive," Sif said, trying to place the accent and change she could hear in what had become of the Allspeech in this place and time - what was it most like, which patterns could she discern.  
"Where am I, good Wealhtheow? In the peat of where?" and saw how the repetition - _was that it?_ seemed to settle Wealhtheow's nerves.

"In the peat of Place, the birthplace of all who live. Come, move with me, I will bring you to our living deity, to our neteru, to the namer of all who exist."

"Where is my sword? Where is my shield?" Good Wealhtheow, I need these before I can go."

"The broad and narrow metal, the unhinged breastplate - those were yours unearthed before you, you were linked to such odd ingots?"

"They were and they are. My sword is the broad and narrow metal. The unhinged breastplate is my shield. If they are not here, where are they - in what place may I find them?"

"All finds are brought to the namer, to her are due each unearthing," Wealhtheow said.

"Then take me to her," Sif requested. "Show me where your goddess makes her lair." She remembered placing Loki's horns upon her head, recalled being struck down by a thegn she had destroyed with her next breath.

"Come," Wealhtheow said, helping Sif to her feet and serving as a crutch while Sif's feet grew steady with use once more. "Join."

Remembered Loki's confession on the eve of Ragnarok. Re-heard in her mind his admission to her and her alone. Her heart again felt so good.

* * *

"There is one neteru, there is one world, there is one of all things but people excepted," Wealhtheow explained as they made their way to the place of the namer.

"Neither was an uncommon belief, even in Midgard, one of the Nine Realms," Sif said. "That does not make it true." And she began to remember the elation that she and Loki would not be fighting in opposition, but alongside each other once more. Even if it was to help Midgard, Loki would so help.

Wealhtheow said, "Since I was unearthed from the peat, I have walked across much of the universe, walked a full circuit of all land."

"I have been to planets and to worlds inverted into orbs facing inwards toward the central sun, and to drifting lands bound to naught. This place, as you describe it, I have never been to its like."

* * *

"This is Heoroðeim, tis our placement now," Wealhtheow said. "Within lies the namer, the guide of lives, the ideal of study."

Sif was eyeing the mud-brick structure before them, and could not shake the feeling that it had been arranged, designed, constructed based upon a memory. Many of the bricks had been painted an oxydized red, while stands of thinly-extruded metals clustered in crosshatches here and there.

"Come, we go enter, time to go within."

"I'll follow you, good Wealhtheow," Sif said. And they approached great doors mimicking cut wood, and entered the first - _vast_ hall. "This could be in Asgard," Sif breathed.

"What place, where is that?"

"My home. Where I am from."

As if chiding a child, "You are from the peat. We all come from the peat, it is the place of origins."

"And before then?" Sif asked. "What was before the peat?"

Wealhtheow just looked at her.

"I've been here two days, and they haven't given me a better answer either."

Sif looked over to where that familiar voice had come from, and, indeed, saw him there. "Loki?" she asked as he, empty-handed, began to run towards her.

"Tis I," Loki said when he reached her, thereupon they embraced.

After sweeping Loki off his feet and twirling, Sif looked up into Loki's eyes and remarked, "That was...new."

"Ragnarok has come and gone," Loki said.

"Are you their god, Loki?"

"Would I make you twirl?"

"True."

“It _is_ good to see you, Sif.”

She could see in his eyes that it was more than just to see and to be seen, but Sif wasn’t about to call him on it, not with the same feeling in her.

Wealhtheow interrupted, saying, "The namer approaches, behold, here comes the namer."

"Jane?" Sif asked.

"Hi," Jane Foster said.

Sif set Loki down, more because she didn’t know how long or how formal this would become, than because of any tiredness in her arms.

“Yes, I’m the neteru,” Jane said. “Ancient Egyptian classes kicked in – that’s the word for gods and goddesses, same word for both, which I thought was really cool.”

Loki had exactly one thing to say to her: “You are a magnet.”

Jane had the grace to look sheepish. “Yeah, first me hitting Thor with my car twice. Then that business with the Æther. And now this. And then this? Now?”

“I would have thought a more rigorous, perhaps industrial setting would have been your choice,” Sif said.

“I have telescopes and observatories here and there, but for the most part… I didn’t make this place deliberately. I mean…

“When I was a girl, I used to imagine a world where everyone was equal," Jane said, "and because I didn't really know about sex, I decided the means for increasing the population was by digging up bog bodies - um, that's perfectly or almost perfectly preserved people who've been dead for centuries or millenia. I didn't like most of the tv shows about people in rocket ships, so I decided one world was enough for the universe if it was big and squiggly enough."

Loki said, "And when you became a god to gods, your mind drew from that mental creation, and made it real."

Sif could now vividly recall seeing Jane clutching the casing as she dodged out of the way of Thanos' master. The casing had shattered, imbuing into one human the power to end and remake universes.

“I made this building – Heorotheim – from what I could remember of where my grandmother lived,” Jane said. “I didn’t remember the wire fence half as well as I remembered the bricks.”

“And, having made a world, you peopled it with draugir,” Loki said.

“Who?” Jane asked.

“Untiring, endless strength, lessened curiosity.”

Eyes wide, “They’re zombies?”

“Draugir.”

“So only those whose bodies were not destroyed, will be here in this world, potentially?” Sif asked, as that was her understanding of how draugir came to be…at least in the universe before Ragnarok. “Wonderful.”

“Um…” Jane said.

“Yes?” both Sif and Loki asked, looking at her.

“There’s also a dragon.”

“Lovely, this gets better and better,” Loki muttered.

“Hey, ease off, I was a Lord of the Rings fan – you _have to_ have a dragon! Or I thought so anyway.”

* * *

“Thoughts?” Loki asked, finding her sitting on one of the less ornamented shields that made up Heoroðeim’s roof, and taking a seat beside her.

Sif said, “I can think of worse places to end my days.”

“Assuming they can end, I agree. Assuming they cannot end, I agree.”

“Removing the ambiguity, Loki? Has this new cosmos infected your mind?”

“Not at all, aside from hoping to experience that run and embrace a few more times, with you again – though I doubt that to be anything but me in origin. And I said both assumptions to remove doubt, to cement myself where I want to be.”

“On a roof?”

“By your side, good lady. With you, Sif.”

“Now you’re talking like them,” Sif said, and kissed him both to shut him up, and to show him that it wasn’t a bad thing.


End file.
